Sachin Rekhi

An Important User Acquisition Lesson From My Many Hours on YouTube

Those who know me know that outside of software, music is a great passion of mine. But not just any music. More specifically, music from up and coming unsigned artists on YouTube. What excites me about artists at this stage is you see them acoustic and raw, often just a guitar or piano and their own vocals. By following them over time, you also watch them grow in confidence and mature over surprisingly short periods of time. Many of them go on to sign deals with record labels, put on national and international tours, and much more. One of the greatest disruptions YouTube enabled was making it possible for individuals with talent to showcase it online, gain an audience, and become successful without the traditional talent scout approach.

But there is an even more interesting trend that has emerged on YouTube in the last couple of years - that of the collaboration. It’s become popular for up and coming artists on YouTube to collaborate with other such artists on a single recording. The recordings always ends up being richer with the combination of two different artist interpretations. But equally important is the cross-pollination of audiences across both artists. Existing fans of one artist are exposed to the other artist and vice versa, significantly growing the fan base for both. It’s a win-win-win user acquisition strategy for each artist as well as their fans. I know I’ve discovered many new artists in this exact way.

As I saw this phenomenon grow in popularity on YouTube, I thought about how to apply the same successful model to the software world. And in fact we adopted it as a core tenant in our user acquisition strategy for Connected.

Our first such collaboration was with Evernote. We started to receive a lot of requests from users to add note-taking functionality to our mobile experience. As we were strapped for resources and focused on the web experience, we decided to instead integrate with Evernote as opposed to building the functionality ourselves. We developed an integration where users could leverage Evernote’s suite of mobile, desktop, and web applications to take notes on their contacts and the note would automatically be associated with the appropriate contact within Connected. It was a great value for Connected users since it got them an even better experience than we would have been able to deliver ourselves. But more importantly, through out listing in the Evernote Trunk app store, we gained significant exposure to Evernote’s audience and saw an influx of users directly from the integration. Similarly, users of Connected now became aware of Evernote as a new integration option and often tried it out even if they weren’t using it before. This cross-pollination of similarly-minded users worked so well, we decided to repeat the strategy across many more integrations.

The next set of integrations we did were with Email Service Providers like AWeber, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. Our integration with each of these services enabled users to learn more about their email marketing list subscribers right within Connected. We also gained exposure to each of these email service provider's customers which closely mirrored our own. And many of our users started to leverage these products since they integrated deeply within Connected.

Given our success with this model, I encourage others to leverage the collaboration as a strategy for user acquisition for your own startup. While more costly to implement compared to running ads or other forms of user acquisition, it creates a win-win-win for all parties when done just right.

What Motivates Me?

I often get asked what motivates me as an entrepreneur to do what I do. For some it’s fortune, for others it’s fame. But for me, it’s this:



Seeing the positive impact the software I’ve built has on real people every day. That’s what motivates me. That’s why I do what I do!

My Professional Identity

I recently went through the thought exercise of trying to define my professional identity on the web. When thinking about the various components that make up my professional identity, I thought about it in terms of what I’d like people to know about me and what best represents myself and my work.

My Primary Identity
The following four online presences represent the core of my professional identity.

1. My Resume - linkedin.com/in/sachinrekhi
If I had to pick a single online presence to represent me, it would certainly be my LinkedIn profile. It provides the most comprehensive view of what I’m doing, what I’ve done, and my areas of expertise.

2. My Blog - sachinrekhi.com
My blog is an equally important part of my professional identity, as I use it as a way to share in long-form my views on various technology issues, my learnings from my various career adventures, and as a platform for promoting my latest project. By perusing my blog, a reader gets a clear sense of the way I think, what I’m interested in, and ways we can mutually benefit from each other.

3. My Tweets - twitter.com/sachinrekhi
I leverage Twitter as my daily platform for engaging in conversations associated with my industry. It’s where I share in short-form what I’m reading, what’s new that I find interesting, as well as network with leaders and colleagues in the space. Given it’s daily activity, it’s by far the best way to learn what’s important to me right now.

4. My Company - connectedhq.com
No picture of me is complete without understanding my work. Thus my company’s website and product are an equally important part of my professional identity.

Up & Coming Presences
Three additional online presences have cropped up as potential additions to my professional identity. They still feel nascent, so I haven’t yet made them part of my core set, though I do think they each have a lot of potential.

1. My Answers - quora.com/Sachin-Rekhi
Quora has emerged as a great place to learn from startup luminaries about the strategies and tactics they employed to be successful. It’s also a great place to exhibit your own expertise and offer your wisdom on a variety of topics. The Quora team has done a great job of cultivating the site in such a way that a Quora answer serves equally as an answer to a question as it does an expression of your own identity. While I am concerned whether they’ll be able to keep the strength of the community as they grew, it’s certainly one that I’m eagerly watching.

2. My Presentations - slideshare.net/sachmonkey
Sometimes the best presentation of my work or learnings is in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and SlideShare provides a great way to share these with the broader community. I’ve used it on several occasions and plan to continue to do so as it provides a more engaging look into my work and thoughts than simple blog posts or tweets.

3. My Open Source Contributions - github.com/sachmonkey
While I haven’t yet made any open source contributions on github, I certainly plan on doing so. It’s become a great place to contribute to open source projects you care about, host your own open source projects, as well as serve as a great showcase for your work. It’s the best portfolio I’ve seen for developers work to date.

Gaps in My Identity
There are also a few areas I feel are lacking in terms of an online presence that I’d like to develop.

1. My Portfolio
I haven’t found a great way to represent my portfolio of work online. As a product guy, the best show case is definitely the products I’ve built. While I do list many of them here, it doesn’t provide the depth I would want from a portfolio. I’d love to find a better way to present and allow readers to explore them.

2. Buzz About Me
Outside blog and press coverage of your work and yourself is a great way to showcase yourself. It’d be great if there was an easy way to include this as part of your online identity. While I do have a press mentions page on the company website, I feel a certain amount also belongs as part of my portfolio as well as should also include interviews of me.

Alternatives I’ve Tried
In addition to the above mentioned presences, I’ve tried a variety of additional services, each with their own unique representation of you. Unfortunately most have not become a regular part of my professional identity.

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sachinrekhi
Google+- http://plus.google.com/114888243026382631402
About.me - http://about.me/sachinrekhi
Flavors.me - http://flavors.me/sachinrekhi
re.vu - http://re.vu/sachinrekhi
friendfeed - http://friendfeed.com/sachmonkey
Zerp.ly - http://zerply.com/sachinrekhi
Path.to - http://path.to/sachinrekhi
Geekli.st - http://geekli.st/sachinrekhi
CrunchBase - http://www.crunchbase.com/person/sachin-rekhi
YouNoodle - http://www.younoodle.com/people/sachin_rekhi
500 Startups - http://500.co/mentor-profiles/sachin-rekhi/
Gist - https://gist.com/sachinrekhi
BranchOut - http://branchout.com/Sachin.Rekhi
Xing - http://www.xing.com/profile/Sachin_Rekhi
Viadeo - http://www.viadeo.com/en/profile/sachin.rekhi
Ushi - http://www.ushi.com/p/61239
Spoke - http://www.spoke.com/profiles/mWqJNsJ
Klout - http://klout.com/sachinrekhi
Kred - http://kred.ly/sachinrekhi
PeerIndex - http://www.peerindex.com/sachinrekhi
Identified - http://www.identified.com/wombat/candidates/56068
MyWebCareer - http://www.mywebcareer.com/profile/sachinrekhi
TweetLevel - http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/User/sachinrekhi
PROskore - http://www.proskore.com/profile.cfm?ContactID=52429444
Twitalyzer - http://twitalyzer.com/profile.asp?u=sachinrekhi

If you have creative ways of representing yourself online or new services you suggest I try, please let me know!

Reflections on the Technology Stack for Connected

Given the recent acquisition of Connected by LinkedIn, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on what worked well with our technology stack as well as what I would like to improve going forward.

If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, feel free to review my previous posts where I detail our technology stack and the open source libraries we leverage. In this post I’ll jump right into our learnings.

What Worked Well

Python \ Django facilitated fast iteration. Our primary purpose for picking Python \ Django as the core of our stack was to enable fast iteration with both new features as well as feature enhancements. Overall the stack held true to this core value, enabling us to release and iterate on features faster than many of our competitors. We would incubate concepts as weekend projects and have them running in production before the weekend was over.

Amazon Web Services enabled on-demand and cost effective scaling. AWS was the key to keeping our costs down but allowing us to scale with spikes in traffic. We could easily spin up additional servers to handle the additional load. Given our work load required significant resources when a member joined but fewer resources afterwards, we were often able to spin down instances to save on expenses after big spikes in traffic.

Python was versatile enough to serve as both our front-end and back-end language of choice. Python worked equally well to build our front-end website as it did to implement our sophisticated back-end infrastructure that is continuously syncing contacts and conversations from various social networks, address books, and email providers. While we have seen some developers build their front-end in say Ruby on Rails but their back-end in Java \ C++ \ etc, we were able to efficiently leverage the same language and code base for both sets of tasks.

Python \ Django libraries embodied the “batteries included” philosophy. The included standard libraries in both Python and Django as well as the broad community of available libraries ensured we rarely re-invented the wheel to support core capabilities. We were able to find reusable libraries for everything from HTML parsing, to vCard reading\writing, to Amazon S3 object manipulation.

Memcache provided a quick win for performance. Memcache as well as the native support for it within Django made it very easy to employ this distributed cache from the get-go to improve performance via caching heavily used queries as well as pre-caching expected future queries. It allowed us to build an experience that felt more responsive than many others in our space.

jQuery minimized our cross-browser JavaScript headaches. By using jQuery for all our of DOM manipulation and AJAX requests, we were able to spend minimal time on JavaScript-related browser incompatibilities.

What Needs Improvement

Database migrations are painful. While Django models make it easy to iterate on data models prior to pushing to production, once they are in production, they do little to support the sometimes complicated and painful data migration process. We ended up maintaining a migrations file with each release that detailed the SQL needed to appropriately migrate the database. To keep things simple, we required that the database and app code were migrated at the same time without requiring backwards compatibility. This was possible in the early days, but started to get more painful as we grew. Many folks have pointed to Django South as a solution to these migration issues. I haven’t yet had a chance to explore it, but certainly plan on doing so going forward.

CSS is not easy to keep cross-browser compatible. While jQuery certainly helped with JavaScript-related browser incompatibilities, we had no such help for our CSS related issues. It’s difficult when leveraging modern UI design and relatively new CSS tags to ensure your page looks good in all supported browsers. While tools like MogoTest help to show what your page looks like in each browser and reduces testing costs, they don’t solve the core issue of enabling authoring a page’s CSS once and not having to worry about such browser incompatibility issues.

Application monitoring requires custom scripts and alerts. We leverage a variety of monitoring and alerting tools to manage our overall infrastructure. These included Pingdom for monitoring up-time and overall site availability, Munin for instrumenting our common application services like Apache, Nginx, MySQL, and memcache, Amazon Cloud Watch for Amazon instance monitoring, Cloudkick for additional virtual instance monitoring, and Django Sentry for app-level exceptions. Yet our most frequently occurring issues around our queue server and third party APIs issues were reported via custom scripts and alerts which were brittle, unsophisticated, and costly to maintain. It would have been helpful to have one overall platform for monitoring and alerting that easily supported our custom events. We’ll certainly be evaluating such solutions going forward.

Nginx, Apache, and mod_wsgi is heavy-weight for Django application serving. Our web application stack consisted of nginx as a front-end web server in front of several Apache instances. Apache interfaced with our Django app via mod_wsgi, which ran a separate pool of processes to handle incoming requests. Originally nginx was responsible for serving static files, but that was eventually off-loaded to Amazon S3, so it currently isn’t doing much for us. The biggest issue though is Apache with it’s high memory usage for each process spawned by the mod_wsgi daemon. It all feels too heavy-weight for our serving needs. Some folks have recommended simply using gunicorn with nginx. I’ll definitely be looking into alternatives like this and would love to see more large scale deployments talking about their experience with them.

There is no built-in framework for versioning static files. Django 1.3’s built in support for handling static files makes it a lot simpler to collect static files from various Django apps and push them to various serving locations, including Amazon S3. However, if you are following web performance best practices by setting long expire headers for static media, you need a way to version your static files to ensure new media are served when deployed. Some of the popular mechanisms for doing this include putting a version number in the path to the static file to ensure the new version is always served. Developers are left to invent their own mechanism for doing so and it would be great if it was either natively supported by the framework or best practices were encouraged.

Sharding your database is difficult. Django 1.2 brought multiple database support to a single Django instance, which allowed you to easily setup rules for where database traffic was routed. The DatabaseRouters mechanism made it easy to setup routing algorithms that enabled schemes like writing to a master and reading from various slaves, or partitioning database tables along app boundaries. However, actually sharding user data across various database shards remains a challenge. The hints offered in the DatabaseRouter mechanism are too limited to enable easy sharding along, say, a user or profile id. Better native support for this would enable developers to plan and build for this early on, as opposed to the expensive task of adding this in later.

Enabling rich JavaScript interactions quickly gets cumbersome. jQuery makes it easy to add simple AJAX interactions to your app as well as demand load various content onto your page. However, as you try to get more sophisticated with your JavaScript interactions, it quickly becomes cumbersome to do so. The first issue you run into is the need for client-side templates. We leverage John Resig’s micro_templating.js to enable this, though the placement of these templates and the syntax was fairly messy. The second issue we ran into was managing state within the client. We began experimenting with backbone.js to implement JavaScript models, but it really only felt appropriate for JavaScript-centric pages. I think there is plenty of room for improvement and we certainly plan on exploring alternatives to rich client-side JavaScript.

Amazon Web Services scaling is not for free. While the promise of on demand resources from AWS are enticing, the reality is it takes a decent amount of work on the developer’s side to enable it and comes with it own operational issues. While on demand virtual instances are certainly broadly available across a number of providers, the mechanisms for automatically scaling up and down your resources require significant input from the developer to manage. In addition, simply adding redundancy across your infrastructure in an environment like AWS isn’t as easy as you think, as you have to think through your deployment configuration to decide whether you wish to spread your infrastructure across multiple availability zones and/or multiple regions. These have latency and cost implications depending on your choices. You also need to deal with the fact you don’t have dedicated hardware, so your instances could be restarted or terminated at any point. We had this happen to us numerous times. Building fault tolerance into your system from the beginning is certainly a best practice, but is a fairly costly hit that you need to take upfront if you are going to deploy to such an environment. It shouldn’t have to be this kind of trade-off.

Round robin DNS is a poor solution for automatic failover. We leverage round robin DNS as a way to load balance across our front end web servers. While it has issues with lookups being cached for extended periods at different points, it does a decent job of balancing traffic across our servers. We also rely on round robin DNS as a simple form of automatic failover. When a browser does a DNS lookup and gets multiple IPs it first attempts to connect on the first IP. If it cannot, then it connects on the second IP and so forth. This provides failover in the case one of your servers is down. In practice, this turns out to be far from the reality. The browser only attempts the second IP if it gets a connection refused back from your server. If your server is experiencing high latencies, the browser will continue to wait on it. The browser also doesn’t cache the fact that it has failed over to an alternate IP. So every request checks the primary IP and then the alternatives, which results in significant latency before the timeouts expire. This makes it an unrealistic solution for automatic failover. Actual DNS failover solutions seem like the right answer.

I hope this provides an interesting perspective on what worked well and what needs improvement in the Connected tech stack. I’d love to hear from any of you if you have potential solutions to some of the issues we ran into!

The Resurgence of LinkedIn

In the wake of LinkedIn’s announcement of reaching 100 million members, I’ve been impressed with the resurgence they have had in the past year. I thought I would showcase some of the recent product innovation from LinkedIn as well as cultural shifts we’ve seen from within the company that have contributed to this growth.

Product Innovation
For the longest time LinkedIn’s product pace has always been overshadowed by the more nimble Facebook, which has constantly been pushing the envelope both on the speed and shape of innovation. While I won’t try to argue that LinkedIn has caught up, we’ve certainly seen it pick up the pace in the past year as well as start to get comfortable in its own skin, understanding exactly where it provides unique value that Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks cannot.

The latest example of this is LinkedIn Today, a social news product for professionals, that automatically builds a daily digest of the top news you’ll likely be interested in based on how it’s trending amongst your professional network. Even despite a product like Flipboard already existing, you can see how LinkedIn Today provides unique value targeted at professionals and aspires to be more on par with a next generation Wall Street Journal.

LinkedIn also realized that much of it’s value is for sales, business development, and hiring managers seeking out specific contacts that can help them achieve their goals. To that end, we saw the redesign last year of search to supported Faceted Search, a much smarter way of filtering your search results to find exactly who you may be looking for. This search mechanism differs significantly from the keyword-centric Google Search, name-centric Facebook search, and recommendations-centric Twitter results. Instead it’s precisely optimized for what LinkedIn users are doing - narrowing their results down to find candidates for the task at hand.

Beyond that, LinkedIn invested heavily in bringing the LinkedIn experience to you, with revamped iPhone and Blackberry apps as well as a new Android app. These apps provide full profile information on the go for both people in your network as well as new folks you may have just met. They are also complete with Bump-style business-card replacement functionality, enabling you to add a LinkedIn contact on the go.

This is just a taste of some of the new products LinkedIn has developed or enhanced in the past year, with many other little feature improvements throughout.

InDays
Beyond this product innovation, we’ve also seen some important cultural shifts inside LinkedIn. One of the most exciting is an initiative spearheaded by Adam Nash called InDays. Every month employees are encouraged to spend one day working on projects outside of their core responsibilities. Alongside InDay LinkedIn also throws a Hackday contest to showcase the best applications that come out of these internal projects. They started posting these internal projects publicly through a separate LinkedIn Labs site. There is some resemblance to Google’s 20% time, though the time dedicated to these efforts at LinkedIn remains fairly minimal.

The kinds of applications that have come out of InDays have typically shown the robustness, power, and richness of the unique dataset that LinkedIn has. For example, the analytics team at LinkedIn developed InMaps, a stunning way of visualizing your connection graph, complete with clustering of your contacts into similar groups. I found clusters of folks from my previous employer Microsoft, colleagues from my alma mater at The University of Pennsylvania, as well as a cluster of fellow silicon valley entrepreneurs. It’s amazing how they were able to deduce these purely on connection data.

Another great application was The Year in Review, which visualized all the contacts within your network that had changed jobs. LinkedIn ended up sending this out as a email marketing campaign to all of it’s users. It’s interesting to see how many of your colleagues have changed jobs as there are always surprises in there that you didn’t even realize.

I’m sure this culture of encouraging innovative ideas from it’s own employees has boosted employee morale as well as given user’s access to functionality that traditionally wouldn’t be on their roadmap. I’m excited to watch these efforts continue.

App Platform
While LinkedIn has been fairly slow to encourage third party developers to leverage their rich data set in their own apps, we are finally seeing this start to change. LinkedIn has been investing more resources in their API platform as of late, recently releasing OAuth 2.0 endpoints as well as a full-featured Javascript API.

Developers are also starting to leverage the API in more ways in their own applications. Cubeduel created a fun hot-or-not style contest for your co-workers, Bump leveraged it to enable sharing of LinkedIn data on meeting folks, and popular calendaring apps Timebridge and Tungle.me provide further details on meeting attendees. My own relationship managemant application Connected uses the LinkedIn API extensively to provide full work history details on all of your contacts.

This renewed energy behind the API will allow developers to take advantage of their rich dataset in functionality beyond what LinkedIn is likely to provide.

Acquisitions
LinkedIn has traditionally been absent from the acquisition scene unlike many of it’s similarly sized tech brethren. However, that all changed this past year when LinkedIn made not only it’s first acquisition, but a total of three.

The first acquisition was mSpoke in August 2010. mSpoke developed content recommendation technology which was presumably leveraged for a variety of recommendation scenarios throughout LinkedIn’s product. LinkedIn quickly followed this up with the acquisition of ChoiceVendor in September 2010. ChoiceVendor offered ratings and reviews for B2B service providers. And most recently, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch in January 2011. CardMunch makes it easy to convert a business card into a digital contact record simply by photographing a business card via your iPhone and having it automatically transcribed by humans for accuracy.

All these acquisitions have been predominantly talent acquisitions for small dollar amounts, but great ways to inject young talent into the fold.


All the recent changes within LinkedIn are clearly in preparation for their upcoming IPO, which they publicly announced their intention to do so in January. I hope this more aggressive LinkedIn continues along these lines, as I truly believe they are sitting on a goldmine of data which they have only scratched the surface on it’s possibilities.

How to Hire Great Engineers for Your Startup

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest Startup2Startup on engineering management with Yishan Wong, an early director of engineering at Facebook.

The area we spent the most time discussing, both during the presentation and during the discussion that followed, was how to hire great engineers for your startup. I thought it was a particularly appropriate topic given that I receive weekly requests from colleagues asking me for help on their quest for engineers. So I thought I'd take a moment to post on some of the most actionable take-aways from the discussion.

The fundamental insight was that a transition has occurred in the last couple of years causing the core problem of technical recruiting shifting away from being a filtering problem to now becoming a marketing problem. The reasons are obvious: the growth in tech fueled by access to capital coupled with the declining engineering graduates continues to widen the supply and demand gap. Startups need to now spend more of their recruiting resources not around improving the filtering process of selecting candidates that have applied for positions, but mainly the marketing process of finding interested candidates in the first place.

With that, let's talk about 5 practices you can put in place today to improve your chances of finding great engineers.

Leverage your network.
We have all heard that the best folks to hire are those that are already in our personal and professional networks. The first thing any of us do when looking to hire is try to recruit folks that we know or have met at some point in our career. But Yishan took it one step further by talking about specific practices that you should be employing to maximize the value of your networking for recruiting. The biggest one was not to simply reach out to folks once and see if they were interested in your opportunity. But instead to hit them up every 3 months. Circumstances change and they change especially fast here in the valley. You want to make sure that not only are you reaching out to them when it may be a good time, but more importantly that you are top of mind when they do decide it's time for a change. The other key strategy is to not simply think of people in your network that are actively looking. Some of the best hires are those that are not looking, yet still decide to jump when they find a much better fit at another company.

SHAMELESS PLUG: You might want to try out my latest product, Connected, as a great way to leverage your network for recruiting.

Become a magnet.
Yishan also talked a great deal about the need for a company to find a way to become a magnet for great talent. In the early days, Facebook widely distributed technical puzzles that they often asked during engineering interviews. While many people thought the puzzles were used primarily to asses technical talent, they were in fact used mainly as a marketing tool. They were eager to find engineers that enjoyed solving and discussing these kinds of technical challenges and wanted to convey to engineers that Facebook was the place to go to tackle them.

Similarly, we talked about how Netflix did a fantastic job of putting together an astonishing culture deck that certainly caused a boost to inbound recruiting with the company. It very clearly laid out what Netflix believed in and how they were going to win in their market and made many people feel like this was an exciting company to work for.

There are a variety of tactics that can be employed to achieve this, but the goal is to find a way for your company to become a magnet of technical talent. Only then can you expect a great pipeline of candidates.

Hire H-1Bs.
Unfortunately the immigration process in this country is still so painful and while there are efforts to resolve them, they still persist. However, many companies simply overlook foreign candidates because of all the hassle associated with the visa process. This can be a real mistake. It turns out that for certain countries, the process really takes no more than a great lawyer and some up-front legal fees. Being open to doing so gets you access to a whole new pool of talent. And frankly, these employees will be more likely to be loyal to you since you have gone through the process of getting them their visa on their behalf. I know several companies that have successfully hired many folks this way.

Contribute to open source.
Early in a startup's life, it can be difficult to justify contributions to open source projects given the limited resources the team has. But it turns out that there are two reasons you may want to reconsider this stance. First, many engineers love giving back to the community and contributing and it can be a real carrot to offer prospective candidates. More importantly, the open source community is very tight knit and having serious contributions to projects can be a great way to market your company to other open source contributors, who are often some of the finest tech talent available.

Prioritize what you need.
Given how difficult it is to hire, it's unrealistic to expect to find someone that matches all your ideal criteria. The key is to pick the few attributes you are really unwilling to compromise on and let that guide your recruiting process. While hiring the right people is paramount to success, so is making forward progress in your company. So make sure you are truly discerning in your required list of criteria. And realize that often attributes like having the right attitude end up being more important than straight technical skills or experience.

I hope that gives you some good ideas on how to super charge your startup's own recruiting process. If you come across other techniques that work, please do share!

The imeem Mafia

Last night I read Sarah Lacy's excellent post entitled Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It not only catalogues many of the excellent startups that have come out of Facebook, but the emerging patterns amongst the bunch.

It got me thinking about my own experience at my previous startup, imeem. When I think back on imeem, I always felt that we had an incredible group of fascinating, talented, and ambitious people. While we never achieved our ultimate goals at imeem, I was sure many of these same folks would move on to something great afterwards. I told myself to keep a lookout as I was sure many would likely start their own ventures.

And sure enough, about a year since imeem's acquisition by MySpace, more than ten new exciting startups have been founded by the original imeem crew. I thought I'd take a moment to showcase some of them.

The most well known of the bunch is obviously Mixed Media Labs, the creator of the popular iPhone and Android photo sharing app, picplz. It's well known not only for it's impressive traction thus far, but because it was started by imeem's founder Dalton Caldwell and his right-hand man Bryan Berg. In addition, they have brought together many from the original crew including Tim DeGraw, Allan Hsu, and even Ali Aydar as a director. They've raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and are a strong contender in the now heated mobile photo sharing space.

Mobile has become a popular space for many of the imeem alumni. One of our top mobile developers at imeem, Ty Amell, teamed up with our search guy, Will Palmeri, to start Stackmob, an application platform to ease the development of mobile apps. They even convinced one of the back-end rockstars at imeem, Keith Dreibelbis, to join them. Similarly, imeem's CMO and Head of Biz Dev Steve Jang went on to start Schematic Labs, which is also focusing on the mobile space. He's roped in former imeem designer Alex Katzen into the mix as well.

Some took imeem's sucess in the entertainment space and propelled it into their own incarnation of an entertainment property. Our COO Ali Aydar went on to be CEO of Sporcle, a gaming site with endlessly entertaining quizzes and more. VP of Sales David Wade went on to start Popdust, a music news, reviews, and gossip site.

Still others have gone in completely different directions, following their passions wherever they lead them. For example, Sameer Alsakran, who managed imeem's entire big data infrastructure, including our large Hadoop cluster, is continuing his work in the Hadoop space with his latest venture White Label Labs. Raj Irukulla and Gina Olsen, two folks who were always passionate about great food, went on to start their own startups in the space. Raj founded FoodPair, which helps you find recipes to make with whatever ingredient you choose. Gina started Mothergood, which produces wholesome snacks for expectant mothers.

As many of you know, I got to imeem myself because my own startup, Anywhere.FM, was acquired by imeem. As I fully expected, the three co-founders of Anywhere.FM, have now gone on to start their own new ventures as well. Anson Tsai is already having amazing success with Cardpool, the easiest way to buy and sell gift cards. Lux Chen is following his dream of getting into gaming with an upcoming iPhone\iPad game. I myself have started Connected, a personal relationship manager that brings all your contacts and conversations together in one place.

Though it's too early to tell which will ultimately be successful, I've continued to be impressed with what the imeem crew has gone on to do. Maybe one day we'll even see a post on TechCrunch about the imeem Mafia instead of the already popular Paypal or Facebook Mafias ;)

Connected: Your Personal Relationship Manager

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of my latest venture, Connected. Connected is a personal relationship manager that brings your contacts and conversations together in one place. It integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Voice to make it easier than ever before to stay on top of your most important relationships.

Relationship Management is Important


I learned early in my career that the story of success in almost every business endeavor starts with relationships. Maybe your buddy introduced you to a potential customer that became a landmark deal. Or an executive at your company championed your project due to the rapport you had built with him. We’ve all seen examples of this happen throughout our careers. Yet how many of these situations feel serendipitous? And are we really maximizing our ability to create such opportunities?

After spending considerable time with folks who I consider successful networkers, I’ve realized that while the tactics they employ may differ, they all regard social capital as one of their most important assets. And they take the time to build, maintain, and leverage their social capital just like the rest of us do with any other kind of asset.

Unfortunately the tools we employ today to manage our relationships are rather abysmal. In an earlier era you’ll remember that executives or sales guys often had a carefully guarded rolodex that they viewed as one of their most prized possessions. Yet today we have no equivalent. While social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have enormous potential in maintaining a vast network, they are insufficient and in fact have exacerbated the problem. We often now end up spending our time simply reading and responding to the folks that bombard our feeds and inboxes. Being so accessible today makes it much more difficult to focus our time and efforts on the relationships that matter.

My goal with Connected is to build the modern day equivalent of the rolodex. And this time make it accessible to the rest of us that aren’t born networkers nor have the time to constantly manage it.

Connected is Your Personal Relationship Manager

Contacts and conversations in one place
Connected brings all your contacts and conversations together in one place. It does this automatically so you don’t have to waste time with the basics of building and updating your address book. With integrations into email, social networks, calendar, and phone, Connected is able to build a comprehensive view into all of your relationships. For every contact you can see your entire conversation history, including last email, last phone call, or even last in person meeting. While it will be some time before Connected supports all available services, today it supports a popular subset, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Voice.

Integrated with the social web
Connected gives you the most complete picture of your contacts by integrating data from across the social web. Your contact’s profile automatically includes their latest status updates, photos, work history, mutual friends, and so much more. Instead of manually scouring the web to stay up to date on a contact’s latest happenings, Connected does the work for you.

Personalized daily agenda
Connected makes this data actionable to you on a daily basis. Every morning Connected helps you prepare for your day by sending you an agenda of all your meetings and everything you want to know about the people and companies that are attending. In addition, Connected helps you stay in touch by discovering opportunities to reconnect with your network. You’ll never miss a birthday, job change, or other important event again. Connected also lets you quickly see who you’ve lost touch with and even set reminders that proactively notify you when you haven’t talked to someone recently.

This is just a taste of the functionality Connected provides to help you build stronger relationships in less time.

Connected is for Networked Professionals

While many folks could benefit from Connected, it is optimized for those of us that are in the business of relationships. That includes sales, biz dev, executives, recruiters, investors, real estate brokers, and much more. It is these folks that feel the greatest pain today without adequate tools to support them. But as with any startup, I’m eager to see who Connected takes hold with and expect to be surprised by what we find.

I hope this gives you some insight into the vision for Connected. Today’s launch represents just the first step in making it a reality. If you are interested in following this journey, Get Connected Today.